


Going to Olympus

by MonoclePony



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, French Jean, German Marco, Language Barrier, M/M, dystopia au, worldbuilding ahoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 07:30:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2843051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MonoclePony/pseuds/MonoclePony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is in turmoil. Under control by faceless men behind the Children With Two Faces, the world as Jean Kirschtein knows it is harsh and cruel, especially to those it takes a dislike to. Cast out from the corrupt city for years for reasons he doesn't like to divulge, Jean lives a life of survival and cynicism, thriving on the idea that maybe if he runs far enough he can live out his life in peace. But then a man bursts into his life with dark glares and firecracker eyes, and most importantly- no tech to translate his language. Jean can't help but be intrigued by the stranger, but the longer he stays, the longer the Interior's warforce, the Greenshirts, close in...</p>
<p>2014 Secret Santa gift for historiadiscordia!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going to Olympus

**Author's Note:**

> This au ran away with me a little too much...  
> Dystopian stories are some of my favourites, and I've always wanted the opportunity to write one! And, well, I learned that I worldbuild far too much...so much didn't make the final cut *sobsob* damn work messing with my writing schedules!
> 
> But anyway, I hope you like it Luka, and Merry Christmas to everyone! :D I hope you have a great time <3
> 
> *whispers* I don't wanna leave this au alone help meeeeee

The day I met him it was raining. Raining more than normal, and the kind that started to sting your cheeks if you stayed out in it too long. I hate fucking rain. Guess it hails back to my ancestors, who apparently always complained about the weather. Well, congratu-fuckin’-lations, now I have a reason to complain; I’m betting their rain didn’t singe you to the bone if you weren’t careful. Got the fucking environment revolting against us to thank for that.

I guess it just followed the people’s example. I think the Interior are still pissed that they can’t control the weather, even if they can control the people.

We’d found a cave just northwest of the floodgates, and I was told to keep guard of the prime spot whilst my companion went hunting. “Someone needs to look after the animals,” she called out over her shoulder when I demanded I come too, “and you’ll do more harm than good, flatfoot.” She’d been gone a day or two, a usual time for someone like her, but I was starting to worry. Not about her, but the lack of food. If she didn’t come back, I’d be starving before too long. I glanced longingly at the mule I’d stolen from the last convoy, but I knew I wouldn’t have the heart to eat her, no matter how hungry I got. Call it sympathy for my fellow animal, I don’t know. And seeing as my horse got shot from underneath me, I didn’t have any other transport.

I missed the Hovers. Hovers were great, until they started exploding- minor hiccup, but the Interior get to zoom around on the ones that didn’t blow up whilst us groundlings are stuck with dumb animals.

I guess I brought it on myself.

When I heard the sound of hooves near the cave entrance I got to my feet, cricking my back as I wandered over to the mule in case it was a foe rather than a friend, but my movements were lazy and sluggish. I knew that the Greenshirts wouldn’t ever stray this far out of civilisation; it was a matter of out of sight, out of mind for them after all. I slowed even more when I heard the familiar voice call my name into the gloom. “I’m comin’,” I replied, half-jogging to reach her. I was thinking of food. Of meat, of boar or deer or maybe even some sort of wild cow. I could feel myself drooling. God, when did I start getting so pathetic over the simplest of things?

I got to the mouth of the cave- and stopped short. There wasn’t a kill draped over her saddle. There was a _person._ A very pissed off, angrily yelling person. “Ymir, what the fuck is this?” I blurted.

Ymir had this way of glaring that nailed you to the floor. She used it at that moment to give her time to slide out of the saddle, give her horse a hefty pat and grab hold of my shirt to haul me up to her height. She was only a few inches taller than I was, but it did the job. “You talk to me like that after I went and got you food?” she hissed. Her voice was getting thicker. The Collar had to be wearing off. I peered at the black metal coiled around her neck, looked for the little green light that blinked at every syllable, transposed every word of mother tongue into the language we all knew and understood as ‘Grey’, and there it was. The light was turning orange. _Shit, and I don’t know a word of Russian._ I tapped at my own Collar and frowned. Mine seemed to be working okay.

Ymir released me with a huff. “He was hunting me. I circled back, caught him before he could make a move.” She sniffed heavily, like she had done us a great favour dragging the poor bastard back to our sanctuary.

I actually paid attention to him then, walked straight over and started looking at him. He didn’t exactly look very threatening, though he was shouting and cursing in some kind of tongue I couldn’t recognise. His hair was lank and lifeless, and hung over his face from his position on the horse, and when I took a step closer and brushed it clear of his face, all I had the chance to glimpse was a pair of furious brown eyes and a constellation of freckles before the man lunged forward and nearly bit my fingers off. “Shit!” I leapt back with a barely concealed yelp of panic, and would have fallen flat on my ass if it wasn’t for Ymir getting there first. She propped me up, gave me a pat and landed a full-on slap across our new companion’s face I the same breath. I winced; I’d been on the receiving ends of many a slap from Ymir, and they fucking hurt. The guy’s head was wrenched to one side at the blow, but all he did was spit out a gobbet of blood and start yabbering away in whatever language he was speaking. By the way he moved, he let an inch of his neck become exposed, and I saw then that he wasn’t wearing a Collar. _Who was this person?_

I huffed. “So you suggest we eat _him,_ is that it?” I asked, stepping away from the enraged captive.

Ymir snorted. “Nah. Too gamey. If we wanted to eat a person, asshole, we’d fatten them up first.”

The look on my face clearly said it all, for she huffed again and turned back to her saddlebags. “Here, a couple of rabbits and a few rats. S’all I could find.” She threw them to me, trussed up for travel, and I caught the rabbits far more favourably than I did the rats. “Brought him back cus I don’t trust him. I think he’s a Blackheart like us.”

Ah, the Blackheart stigma. There was nothing like being branded treasonous and forced out of your home under the name of Blackheart. It had started small, I remember; first it was the criminals, those of us who’d actually done some wrong, that were ejected from society and forced to walk the lonely paths outside of civilisation. But then they came for others. They started to come for those who opposed them, those who spoke out against their regimes and their hatred. Then it got worse. They came for anyone who was different, breaking into their homes and destroying livelihoods that families had spent years trying to nurture and grow, and like seedlings underfoot, they were crushed. We were nothing to them. We had fatal flaws, and they wouldn’t have us anymore.

I squinted at him. “Even we have Collars. What did he do, to be refused one?”

Ymir shrugged. “Who knows? But we better get further inside, the rain looks like it’s picking up.”

Dinner that night was a strained thing. The guy sat as far away from us as he possibly could, the wall of acidic rain roaring from the sky enough to prevent him from escaping, but his knees were drawn up into himself and his gaze was firmly fixed on the outside world.

I have to admit, I stared. A lot. Over the fire, the crackles and flames set something alight in him that I couldn’t pin down, but it was enough to make him the most interesting thing that had happened to us for a while. Ymir, meanwhile, was too busy tearing into her hunk of meat to pay him much notice. She’d mentioned that if he was a Feral that we could always sell him to someone. “He’s a pretty piece of flesh, can’t deny that, Jean,” she said with a wink. And the more I looked at him, the more I saw it. Sure, he had a few scars on his face and more of a mop than actual hair, but that could be neatened up. And he definitely wasn’t dangerous; after that first snap, he’d been surprisingly quiet. Now, as he sat there, he seemed defeated, hopeless, and I felt a slight ache for him. He probably had no idea what was going on, where he was or anythi-

“Stop.”

I blanched. The single word rattled my bones. It wasn’t exactly chilling, but it wasn’t friendly either. And the voice didn’t belong to Ymir. It could only be one person. I glanced back to his face, and met the pair of eyes again. They weren’t as wild anymore, but they were certainly angry. “S-sorry?” I squeaked.

The eyes narrowed. “Stop,” he repeated. He gestured with a hand between our eyes, and I understood. _He’d caught me staring. Shit._

I tried to gabble away my reasons, but realising that he probably couldn’t understand a damn thing I said, decided to go for the obvious. “Sorry about that. I haven’t seen many people for a while. You can’t fault a man for being curious.” The expression I was fixed with suggested you could. _Maybe he could understand me._ “What’s your name?” I tried.

“Marco.”

_Marco._ The name wasn’t common where I came from, but what did I know? I’d been a Blackheart for five long years now; Trost could have been filled with Marcos for all I knew. “Can you understand me?” I asked him.

A nod.

“Can you talk Grey?”

A shake. A filthy look. A muttered curse.

“Not a fan of the Universal Language, eh?” I snorted. “They did it for our own good, you know. Makes everyone so much easier to understand.”

Marco’s head shaking got stronger.

“Oh, you disagree? Well, do enlighten me.”

His mouth opened, then shut with a stubborn snap. I couldn’t help but feel a little stab of triumph, a one-upping of the stranger who now shared my cave. I smirked- couldn’t help it, I didn’t have much chance to smirk anymore- and said, “Thought not,” in the same self-satisfied way I used to.

‘Marco’ went back to staring outside at the poisonous rain. I tried not to notice the way his jawline seemed to slope like it was carved from the softest rock faces. When I offered him a rat, he turned his nose up at it. Ymir told me not to waste our good food on him, that he wasn’t worth it, but when she fell asleep I couldn’t help but feel a bite of guilt. The poor guy was probably starving too. I knew the gnawing feeling of hunger all too well, and if I had the choice I wouldn’t let anyone go hungry. So I dipped my bowl into the remnants of stew Ymir had tried to cook over our meagre fire, and walked over to him.

He jolted awake when my shadow fell over him, but relaxed when he saw what I had in my hands. His eyes flickered from the bowl to my face suspiciously, trying to sense if there was a trap involved. In the firelight, even his eyes became firecrackers. “Eat,” I prompted, pushing the bowl into his hands. “It’s alright. You may be a silent, snappy little bastard, but you should keep up your strength. You’ll need it out here.”

Marco gave me one final glance, a glance that felt too analysing to be comfortable, and then he brought the rim of the bowl to his lips. He ate silently, casting glances to the shape of Ymir in the gloom, but I stayed where I was. Call me an idiot, go ahead, but there was something about this stranger that fascinated me. “So, you understand Grey?” I asked him as he ate.

Marco swallowed his mouthful, considered it, then nodded.

“But you don’t speak it?”

A shake.

“Well, we’ll need to get you a Collar at some point, or else we can’t understand you. And trust me, Ymir gets frustrated when she can’t know what someone’s talking. Or thinking, for that matter, but that’s not gonna happen any time soon.” The ferocious glare I got in response made me blink. “You really _are_ against the Language aren’t you?”

Marco looked at me. And then he said something. “ _Sprache ist Macht.”_

I couldn’t understand it, of course, but it sounded important.

* * *

 

We found him a Collar a few days later. Ymir needed to charge her own, and there was a convoy in sight, so she left us together whilst she scouted ahead. Her horse was faster than my mule, and fleet as a deer. It hadn’t taken a bullet yet. Mine hadn’t been so lucky.

Marco could have run. He could have hit me over the head with a rock and ran for his life. The rain was holding off, after all, and we ventured outside just for a change of scenery. But he didn’t. He stayed. The anger he’d shown towards me at first was disappearing; the more he calmed, the more I realised that his violence was a flash of white hot panic. It seizes us all, and renders us incapable of anything remotely human. That was what he had to watch out for, living outside the walls. The terrain turned men into beasts, and we had to be careful. We didn’t want to end up like the Outers. But Marco seemed to have gentled, and now much preferred to sit in the charred earth watching me walk the mule around in circles, testing to see if she was surefooted enough to carry on the journey. She’d had a bad leg when we’d stolen her, but it seemed to be healing. I gave her an absent pat when I was done and turned back to him. “You ever ridden a horse?” I asked.

Marco looked up, frowned. He held up one finger. “Once? I guess you didn’t really have to learn, if you were sat nice and snug in the Interior. What, did you have a car, a teleport?” Marco shook his head. He put his palm flat, and made his fingers walk across the surface. “You walked everywhere? Jeez, you put the lazy bums of the Interior to shame.”

Marco beamed.

My stomach twisted.

_Not here, you bastard, don’t you dare._

Before he could mime much else, or smile or nod, Ymir turned up. Her horse was covered in a thin film of sweat and was blowing hard, but Ymir’s smile showed that she was triumphant. “It’s all sorted,” she said, her voice a lot more discernible now her Collar was working fully, “and I got one for Freckles over there.” Marco’s smile morphed very quickly into a scowl. The moment Ymir dismounted and brandished the ring of black metal at him, he shook his head and took a few steps back, still glaring. “Come on, now, don’t make me hurt you,” she said, throwing her horse’s reins to me as she advanced on the retreating Marco.

But still he glared defiantly. It was running through his veins hot and enraged, and I couldn’t help but feel a little nervous. “ _Ich würde lieber sterben_ ,” he hissed, baring his teeth the closer Ymir got.

I wanted to warn her, but I knew there would be no need. Ymir knew what she was doing, and once she got within striking distance she threw an arm over Marco’s neck and tugged, sending him down onto his knees with a howl. She tried to get the Collar on him then, but he struggled and kicked and cursed until she ended up tackling him to the floor. I watched as he fought her every move, screaming out the same words, “ _Ich würde lieber sterben! Ich würde lieber sterben!”_ with every breath.

“Jean, get over here and help!” Ymir ordered, her grip on Marco starting to slacken as he struggled.

And I did. I pinned him down, practically sat on him so that Ymir could get the damn Collar on. This was for the best, I reminded myself. These were supposed to make people’s lives better, supposed to make them easier, this was for his own good. So why did I feel so awful? Marco was shouting, cursing, spitting at us to try to free himself, but once Ymir managed to fit the Collar around his neck he froze like a man trapped in ice. It was as though all the fight had gone out of him. It’s not strange. It happens. Sometimes the Collars have to tap into your brain patterns to get what they need, and if you haven’t had one on for a while…

So we waited. And waited.

We weren’t to know if it had worked. Marco didn’t speak. He refused. Even when we got back to the cave and started making dinner, he sat apart from us, lips clamped forcefully shut and his hands constantly pawing at the metal that had looped around his neck. That was the other thing with the collars; they could be slipped on easily enough, but then they would mould to your neck and make removing them impossible unless you knew how. Ymir knew the passcode to Marco’s Collar. I didn’t. Marco didn’t. So he stayed quiet.

He stayed quiet for three days.

It nearly broke me.

I know it was none of my business, and that I would be moving on soon enough, but it did. It tore at my insides, grabbed at my gut and jabbed at my lungs that I was the reason for his silence, and I felt like the worst human being on earth for it. That was why, on the fourth night, I sidled closer to him and shoved a second helping of stew in his direction. “Tastes like shit,” I remarked conversationally, “but you should eat it.” Marco didn’t even look at me. He pushed the bowl away with a barely contained sigh. The pain in my chest increased. “C-come on, say something,” I said. I almost begged- _almost._

He sighed again. Looked at me. “Your friend is a monster,” he said.

And _wow._ The syllables that rolled off his tongue, the accent, everything, it was covered with the soot of anger but they were beautiful. I shuffled a little closer. “Say something else,” I muttered.

“I do not want to use this bastardised language,” Marco replied, his consonants sharp and spiky and his vowels oh so soft. He glared at me then, really glared, and I felt something break. “What have you done to me?” he hissed.

“I…” What could I say? How could I comfort him, when the reason for his upset was wrapped around his neck, and I was the one who put it there? Instead, I did the thing I always resort to. I huffed. “You need to get used to it. We need to understand you and by fuck it makes talking to you easier.”

“I never asked for you to talk to me.”

Okay, fucking ouch. “We have no choice!” I exploded. “Out here, you need all the allies you can get, alright, so if you wanna walk out there, be my guest! But there’s a fucking storm coming and you’ll be stripped to the bone if you do!”

Marco glared at me, and glared _hard_. I could feel the knives of his eyes piercing into my skin, but I glared right on back until he let out a sigh and turned away. “You do not understand,” he said. He wasn’t defeated by a long shot, but it looked like he knew when he was fighting a losing battle. “You refuse to understand…” his voice trailed off. The thread was snapping between us. He wasn’t getting _bored_ exactly, but he definitely didn’t feel as at ease around me as he’d done before. He gave a small huff and slammed his head back against the cave wall in a temper. “That is the worst of all,” he gritted out. “You are ignorant. You still have the Interior attitude.”

I glared at him. “The hell do I. You don’t know me. You never want to know me, and I just want to survive, alright?” The poison was seeping through me, the poison of anger that curled in my gut and stabbed at every available spot. Maybe we were both being ignorant of each other, I couldn’t be sure, but I was not at fault here. “Just tell me what I don’t understand about you!”

He didn’t tell me that night. He just shot me a look of absolute venom and turned over, curled up and that was that. Nothing.

* * *

I had to save him from a scouting Greenshirt before he told me what I wouldn’t understand. We were travelling West, a direction Ymir had a ‘hunch’ about, and as Marco didn’t have anywhere else to go, he followed us. That was the first instant when I realised that there was something more to him- if he really hated me that much, he’d have gone at the first opportunity.

He bolted when the guns started firing, and I spurred my mule after him. I was damned if I was going to let him charge off into the wilderness on his own; stupid idiot would probably get himself killed. I plunged through a glade of concrete and rusting metal, spurring faster to keep up with the chase going on in front of my eyes. The scout sent to take Marco down was young, brainwashed and quite frankly shit at his job, because he kept missing his shots. I was thankful, obviously, but that was the truth. It was a wonder he even got into such an ‘elite’ force if he couldn’t even shoot straight. But then he managed to hit Marco’s leg, and he went down. _Shit._ The mule stumbled as I aimed, but I wasn’t a shit shot. Even though I’d been aiming for the scout’s head, I got him in the chest; with a grunt of surprise and a gurgle as blood forced itself out in the wrong direction, the scout sank to his knees and stayed there. Good fucking riddance.

I was ripping my arrow from the scout’s back with a curled lip, inwardly cursing the man’s family and lineage, when Marco squeaked out an unfamiliar word on his lips as he grabbed my startled mount’s reins. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” I muttered despite the pang of triumph at hearing him. “The guy’s a damn Greenshirt. Would’ve shot him anyway.”

“Well, I am glad you shot in my direction.” Marco winced as he moved, and I noticed the way his leg seemed to be unwilling to co-operate with him.

“Is your leg that bad?” I asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Marco,” I said, stepping closer, “You got hit in your leg. You alright?”

“Y-yes I did, but I’m fine, I promi-”

I gave it a gentle nudge with my boot.

He blanched.

“You are not okay.”

“Not when you _kick_ it, I’m not.”

I made him ride on the mule for the rest of the journey, and once we set up camp for the night, I managed to get the bullet out with my pen knife and used the last of the bandages to swaddle the wound. Marco didn’t cry out once- it was like he was used to pain. Not for the first time, I let my eyes flick up to the scars on his face. It was only for a hair’s-breadth of time, but Marco noticed. “I got them in a riot,” he said. “Greenshirt smashed a bottle around my face. Lucky I didn’t lose my eye.”

“Jesus,” I breathed, barely realising that I was reaching up to trace their outlines until I made contact with his skin. Thankfully, Marco didn’t move- he appeared to be in a talkative mood. “Where was the riot?”

“In Trost. The last major one before they started cutting the people down.”

My stomach twisted. “You were in the _Trost rebellions_?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it. I’d still been in the Interior back then. I’d not gone, I was too terrified of being recognised, but I was there. I remembered the sound of the protestors marching past my window, the comradery between them all and the hope they seemed to bellow to the sky… but then I also remembered the screaming, and the gunfire. I shut my eyes, still tracing his scars, and said, “You must have been very brave, to go out there and do what you thought was right when you knew there were men with guns pointing at you.”

“Bravery had nothing to do with it. It was common sense that got me out on the streets- it’s arrogance that got me the scars.” Marco shrugged, an air of modesty overshadowing his words. “It happens. Life moves on.”

I stared at him. I couldn’t believe that this man could be so humble. He had taken part in one of the last great attempts to right the wrongs of the world, an event that cost so many their lives and many more their freedom, and he’d only come away with a few scars and a broken smile? It was… it was incredible, was what it was. “Is that why they sent you out here?” I asked.

Marco swallowed painfully. “It was a mixture of things.”

“What sort of things?”

Marco shrugged. “Disrupting the peace, mainly. But the refusal to wear a Collar was probably a big one.”

I frowned. “Why do you have such a thing about them?”

Marco was tugging at the metal absently as we talked. He wasn’t as forceful as he used to be with it, and a selfish part of me hoped that it was because he liked being able to talk to me. Maybe it was just becoming a force of habit, a minor slip where he’d drift his hand up to check that it was there. He sighed at my question. “Because I studied the old languages. I can read them, I can write them, I can speak a lot of them too. Creating this… universal language was like shooting them point blank in the head like lame horses.” He shuddered at the thought. “What everyone fails to notice is that language is power, and this ‘Grey’ language is serving the masters, not the subjects.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I said you wouldn’t.” Marco gave me a wistful smile that unknotted some of my fear. “They didn’t want anyone to be able to speak in a tongue they didn’t recognise as their own in case they were talking treason. That’s the only reason they made this language, to keep an eye on us.”

“You really believe that?”

“You can’t really be defending their decisions, if you’re stuck out here too.” Marco squinted at me. “Why are you here, anyway?”

I gulped back the lump in my throat. Oh god, here it came. “My parents were activists,” I said starting with the acceptable one first. “They didn’t want me turning into one even though I was estranged from both my parents for years when they finally found me. That, and…” I bit my lip. “Put it this way, there’s a reason Ymir and I travel together.”

It was Marco’s turn to frown. “What do you mean?”

“We’re both unnatural in the Interior’s eyes, we’ll leave it at that.”

I didn’t want to tell him about the hiding, the covering up of everything I thought was so natural, the stolen kisses in the dark above the Eyes of Giants and the speeches that left me without a heart to give away. I didn’t know much about Ymir, but I knew that she would have gone through the same sort of thing. But she wasn’t afraid. She stood up at her trial and shouted it. I hadn’t been quite so bold.

I didn’t need to say anymore. Marco understood. He gave a small nod, staring into the dying flames in front of him. “You’ve done nothing wrong,” he said.

“I know that.” I rooted around in my discarded saddlebags, finding a battered packet of cigarettes I’d managed to swipe a few months back. I was savouring them, and tonight was a good night to get a hit of nicotine. As I lit it on the fire and inhaled deeply, I didn’t miss the way Marco’s eyes wandered to my lips. “Try telling that to the fuckers in charge.”

“They’re only in charge because of the Children.” Marco folded his arms, keeping his gaze on me at all times. It was kind of nice, actually; the prickly feeling of being watched vanished after a little while. I’d stopped looking for a gun in my reach a long time ago when I was around Marco. “Without them, they’re nothing. And the Children don’t know what they’re doing; they’re so…”

“Doped up they don’t know what the fuck’s going on? Yeah.”

I’d forgotten Ymir was even part of us for a moment. She sat on the opposite side of the fire, looking at us with her lidded gaze and heavy brows. She looked as though she wanted to say more, but couldn’t quite think how to. She was hurting though- that much was obvious. “They were a fluke. A joke nature wanted to play on us. That’s all. They should have been shot at birth.”

Marco blinked. “But it’s not their fault!”

“Spare me,” Ymir scoffed. “If they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be out here, living in ruins and eating rats.”

“Well, yes, but…”

“But nothing. They’re a curse.”

And that was the end of that conversation. I half wished that Ymir hadn’t intervened. I tried to ignore the way that, when I finally tried to sleep, Marco shifted closer to me than he had before. He might have mumbled something about ‘conserving body heat’ but I wasn’t so sure about that.

He knew.

He knew about me and he wasn’t disgusted.

It wasn’t just relief I felt that night, when he got so close in his sleep that he flung an arm around me at one point.

Nope. Definitely not just relief.

* * *

I found out a lot more about him as the days turned swiftly to weeks. Now he was talking to me freely, he was happy to talk about everything- and I mean _everything_. He told me about his old life, where he’d worked as a bookkeeper in an archive and loved it more than life itself. He told me about his older sister who fought for freedom and vanished in suspicious circumstances at the height of the rebellions. He was so close to it all that it was sort of startling; here I was, hiding from everything I knew was going on, but he’d been there living it for so long. It just went to show that the Interior life was getting worse the longer the Children remained under the control of the leaders.

Ymir avoided us for a lot of the time; she would disappear to hunt for days on end, only returning for an evening before slipping away again. She came back with a horse for Marco once, and the tense way they glared at one another was enough for her to vanish again. Marco gave me the horse. He preferred my mule- he was rather attached to her, even if she was about as much use as a chicken with no legs in a crisis. He started calling her Emlin, and the name got well and truly stuck. _Emlin_ was part of the group now, whether we liked it or not.

It was things like that which made it impossible not to fall for Marco. He had this innocence wrapped around the cynicism that was so different to anyone I’d ever met before. He was the single most hopeful person I stumbled across. And that was fine with me. Waking up with feelings in my chest instead of the usual lead was a nice change, and I tried to keep it as safe and as secure as I could without it falling and being crushed underfoot.

So I didn’t tell him. I didn’t dare look at him for too long, or shuffle close, or brush our hands together when I handed out a helping of food. Accepting what I was and acting on the urges were two very different things, and I had to make sure I knew that.

I broke my promise when Marco found a book in an abandoned village we strolled through a month later. “Jean!” he cried out when he found it, so loud that I thought he was in trouble. After practically breaking the rotten old door off its hinges to get to him, the flares of panic receded when I saw what he was cradling in his arms. “You got me scared for a book?” I asked, looking down at my hands with splinters embedded in them. I was lucky I wasn’t bleeding, shit.

Marco gave me this fucking bashful smile that made me regret saying anything bad ever, and gave a small shrug. “I’m sorry, Jean, it’s just… I had to leave all of my books behind, and the ones I did bring with me got lost in the forest.” He opened the cover and began to flick through the pages, barely containing his gleeful squeak. I rolled my eyes. _Oy. This guy._ “It’s in my tongue, too!”

“Yeah, yeah, come on, we need to get going. The Greenshirts can’t be far behind.”

We ended up setting camp there, in the middle of the old village square. We didn’t have Ymir with us, and the Greenshirts were nowhere to be found. _The scouting party must have moved East_ , I reckoned, but there was another reason we were staying here, too. Even some sort of twisted shadow of normal life was nice to indulge in from time to time, and I think Marco felt it too. We tethered the animals in the crumbling barn and used the house in the best condition for our base. Marco was reading the book the moment he figured it was safe to, cross-legged on the floor like a schoolchild whilst I tried to get a fire going.

It would have been nice if the house actually had things in it, but it was nothing but a skeleton of what it once was; the flesh had been taken away, destroyed, swallowed up by time, but I couldn’t complain- we had a roof over our heads for the first time in a long while, and just when it was due to rain again. You could taste it in the air, after a while. It had a sharp tang of promise that clung to your tongue and curdled your gut, and you knew you needed to get to shelter, and quick. It was alright for the Greenshirts; they had uniform that repelled the rain, cloaks that neutralised the acid. They could move through thunderstorms if they wanted to. But us? We were stuck waiting for it to go off.

I should have known we’d be sitting ducks.

But we didn’t realise. Maybe it was the way we were too wrapped up in our own discoveries- Marco with his damn book, and me with him. Or maybe it was because we felt safe, for once. Either way, we weren’t to know that it was our last night until everything changed.

Marco was reading the book aloud to me as I tried to get the fire to catch, and got frustrated at the way the Collar translated his language, and it made me laugh to see the little crease appear between his brows every time he reached a particular word the Collar didn’t change well enough. “My language has words that this Collar can’t comprehend,” he grumbled, tugging at the Collar- or the infernal contraption, as he preferred to call it- with annoyance.

“I can tell,” I said, “because I’m pretty sure you didn’t just use the word ‘comprehend’. You ain’t _that_ refined.”

To my surprise, Marco laughed. “You have a good point, there.”

“Your Collar hasn’t adjusted to you, yet. Hasn’t pick up your slang or anything. It will, just give it some time. It’s still a little frazzled.” I turned back to the fire.

“I’m not planning on it getting used to me.”

“I can understand your book, Marco, give it some credit.”

Marco grunted. “I suppose that’s true.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t have a clue what the book was about; I’d been too busy letting his soft tones wash over me like a calm sea to pay attention. It could have been explaining what the inner anatomy of a parasite was, for all I cared. It was moments like these that made me realise just how much I’d fallen for him; I didn’t listen to anyone like I listened to him. He continued to read, silently this time, his eyes flickering across the pages like he was delving in deep. I let him be for a while, finally managing to spark the fire and scare myself with the flare of light it emitted.

Once it was definitely roaring in the centre of the room, I took the plunge and moved over to Marco. He gave me a smile like I’d been gone for hours, and patted the space next to him. I sat. Gulped. Tried to be normal. But what was normal? All of a sudden I had no idea. “Can you read this?” Marco asked, motioning down to the book. I snapped out of it. _Yeah. Right. Focus._ I leant over his body- to see, I swear- and frowned. “Not that, but I can read Grey.”

Marco raised a brow. “You never learned how?”

I shrugged. “That’s not my language. I can’t even remember what mine is. It’s been so long since I’ve heard it.”

“You must have got your Collar young,” Marco observed.

I knew the question of ‘when’ was going to come up, but it didn’t mean I was prepared for it. It didn’t make me any more willing to talk about it, either. But this was Marco, and I was in love with the fucking idiot. So I guess I owed him. “It would have been when I was thirteen,” I said, trying to play it off like it was nothing. “That was the time I realised that I was different, and a dangerous kind of different to outsiders. I realised I had to hide it.”

“Was that the day you ran away?”

Something flared in my stomach that had nothing to do with the crackling pops the fire was making in front of us. I looked to Marco, my eyes wide and my breathing shallow. It wasn’t something I necessarily kept to myself, but it was still a part of me that he hadn’t known about. I’d made an effort not to tell him about it- I don’t know why. Maybe I thought he’d judge me.

My surprise must have been pretty obvious, because in the next breath Marco said, “you were scared, Jean. It’s alright that you ran, you know.”

My jaw clenched. _No it’s not. I ran, and my parents paid the price. If I’d been there when they came for them, I might have been able to hold them off. Fight back. Anything. But I didn’t. I just ran._ “Yeah, well,” I muttered, “it was a long time ago, so.”

“Have you ever thought about hearing your actual language?”

“What’s the point? It’s not gonna mean anything to me.”

“I’d like to hear it.” That was when I stopped and full-on stared. I couldn't help it. There was a little haze of pink colouring Marco's cheeks, but his eyes were firmly fixed on the book. So, who knows, there could have been something really raunchy happening in it, but by the way he was so adamant not to catch my eye... I wasn't so sure. "Y-you would?" I spluttered.

"Well, yeah, I was a bookkeeper, I know languages, I wouldn't mind hearing yours." Marco tried to shrug it off, but it didn't work. He just got more twitchy.

Marco really wanted to hear my shitty language that no one could understand? The language the government had taken away from me like a sea witch stealing a mermaid's voice? That was a new one. I wetted my lips. "I... I guess I could try to override the Collar for a little while..." What was I saying?

Marco looked hopeful. "Really?"

"Yeah." All in the name of science, and all that. I brought out a small screwdriver that was pretty much blunt from use from my supply bag, and got to work.

It took about an hour. The Collar technology was complex and intricate, but it needed to be idiot-proof. If it was meant to muffle the entire population, it had to be easy to fix, after all. So I messed with it. Tripped a wire here, changed a part there. Doing it to myself was pretty tricky, I must admit; it would have been far easier for Marco to do it, but he watched my struggles with wide, impressed eyes. I liked the feel of his eyes on me, and how interested he seemed to be. He told me that the green light flashed blue, and said he'd never seen it do that before. In all honesty, neither had I. "I could have programmed it to blow me up," I joked, and hoped that my shitty sense of humour was wrong.

Once the button turned blue, my only guess was that pressing it would disable the communications tech inside it. That was my hunch. Like I said, it could have turned me into jam. Goes to show that I really cared about what this Collar-hating, riot-inciting lunatic thought of me. When I hovered my thumb over the button, he scooted forward a little closer, nodded encouragingly. I gulped. I put the smallest amount of pressure on the little blue light. And then there was a gentle 'hissss'. I waited for a few seconds, then let out a sigh of relief. I wasn't going to blow up. Good.

"Did it work?" Marco asked eagerly, scooting even closer. "Say something!"

I rolled my eyes. " _Do you know how stupid you look right now_?"  But it didn’t come out like that. It came out, "Tu sais que t'as l'air d'être con, n'est pas?" and unnerved the hell out of me.

Marco's eyes snapped wide. "Oh," he breathed, everything in him freezing. "Oh, god."

I frowned. "Quoi? C'est quoi le problème? Ça sonne bizarre?"

**" _What? What's the problem? Does it sound weird_?"**

Marco shook his head. "It doesn't sound strange, it's... Jean, it's French."

French. Huh. Never heard of it. Sounded crunchy, curt, the kind of language that would make people clap hands to their ears if they could hear it. But then I listened to myself talk properly, and I heard it. It was like liquid, flowing and smooth, and nothing like the spiky tones Marco had. His were lovely in other ways. His voice, no matter how much I cared to admit it, sounded warm. Homely. This sounded like it could have dripped from the mouth of royalty, but it didn't suit me. Not me, the rough and ready Blackheart who didn't care about anyone but himself. Everyone knew how wrong that assumption was, but I liked to hold onto the thought of it. But the way he was looking at me, dear God...

I felt two things.

Awkward as hell was one of them.

Turned on as fuck was the other.

I'd never had someone's eyes on me that looked so hungry. I didn't know whether he wanted to devour me or my voice, but I sincerely hoped that it was a bit of both.

"T-Tu me comprends?" I asked, almost choking on my own spittle at the way he stared. **" _C-can you understand me_?"**

Marco waved his hand in the air in a 'so-so' gesture. "I can and I can't. There are some words I can pick out. French wasn't my strong suit when I was learning..." He shuffled a little closer. "Say something else. Please."

He really was close. I could feel his chest moving as he breathed, and I could trace every ridiculous freckle that wasn't barred by scar tissue. His face was so close, lips so inviting... if I leant just a little bit closer, I could get away with it, surely...

"Je pense que je t'aime," I said in the lowest tone I could muster. I hoped he wouldn't be able to understand that, and just think it was another beautiful phrase from a dead language. But I saw the hesitation in his eyes and I realised that yes, he had understood that and shit, I was in trouble.

_I’d just told him that I thought I loved him_.

Before I could explain myself, he was kissing me.

It started off gentle, his hand only coming up to steady me when I started to pull away out of nerve, but once he broke the kiss and murmured a soft, "it's alright", I think my common sense took a running jump off a cliff edge. I hadn't been kissed by many people in my life, but Marco clearly had more experience than I ever thought he would. His lips were soft when I wanted them to be, and hard when I needed the pressure; he eased me into a rhythm that had us raining down soft kisses, slow kisses, hungry kisses, all the kisses under the sun onto our swollen lips until we were both led on the floor and gasping into each other's mouths. _I didn't know_ , I wanted to sob. I didn't know, and I wish I'd known sooner because fuck all the dancing around him and trying not to be obvious- he _wanted_ obvious. But he didn’t care. He was still kissing me. Then he pulled a tiny chunk of my hair, and I think I would have died there and then if it weren't for his body crushing against mine to ground me. His lips started to stray down to my neck, biting and sucking, and I couldn’t help the way my hips arched against him at the treatment. God, it felt too good.

And he made me feel like that for _hours_.

I thought it was just an animalistic reaction, the kind you see with the forest deer in the spring. Once the opportunity for romance is in the air, the stags go crazy and start fighting tooth and nail to have that right, that single right, to have their way with all the females around them. I watched them once, waiting for one of the males to tire so I could pick him off and carry back the spoils for Ymir, and couldn’t believe the way that they were willing to die just so they could breed. I hadn’t even had to kill one in the end; it was speared by its opponent’s antler and went down heavy, and didn’t get back up again. So nobody can blame me for imagining everything to be so rough, so vicious and so claiming.

That’s what I expected, but it was nothing like that.

It was lazy, and controlled, and every kiss we gave each other was slow and steady. We didn’t feel the need to rush, and even when my breath hitched and I tried to swallow Marco’s moans down my throat, he would chuckle and draw the kiss out a little longer, a little farther, so it felt right. There was no violence to it; when I shuffled away and bit my lip, Marco stopped. Just like that. He just stopped everything he was doing and shifted back to just lying next to me, waiting for permission. And, well, I’d never seen that before.

I apologised- in broken French because my Collar was beginning to kick into power save- and Marco just smiled and shook his head and said there was no need to apologise. That, even though the world was going to hell and we were in the first scrap of civilisation we’d seen in a long time, we had time.

I wish I’d caught the glint in his eye before.

The glint that told me Marco Bodt was an excellent liar.

* * *

We didn’t even get the grace of a morning’s sleep. The familiar clinical buzz woke me up near dawn, and I lifted my head groggily from the floor to listen. It only got louder, more insistent, and for a moment I wanted to just throw something out the window at it to get the noise to shut off. But then my eyes opened a little more. The buzz was too loud to be a simple sweeper. That meant…

“Hover,” I hissed, ducking my head back down and prodding Marco awake. “Oi, get up!”

“Hn?” Marco lifted his head and rolled towards me, sleepily landing a kiss on my chin. It was a sloppy kiss, but it didn’t fail to make my stomach bellyflop. “Wha’ issit?”

“Hover. Close by.” I didn’t realise I had my Grey language back until I felt the bland tang of it come out of my mouth. It felt more robotic than ever. Maybe I realised why Marco hated it so much. I got to my feet and ducked the second I reached the blasted-out windows. There were Greenshirts, alright. Lots of them. “Shit,” I cursed, “they’ve got an army out there, why the fuck are they bothering?”

We attacked their convoys, sure; we took their horses sometimes, food more often than that, but that was nothing but an annoyance to them. It wasn’t a _real_ crime- there was a saying that went around the Interior that said ‘Blackhearts are as Blackhearts do’, and Ymir and I were more than happy to keep to that. But the attacks on _us_ had been coming a lot more frequently than before… and the only difference was-

“Oh no,” Marco breathed.

I froze.

_No._

I turned to look at him in what felt like slow motion, trying to prolong the denial that was already settling in my gut, trying to muffle my instinct. I didn’t want to think about the fact that since Marco had joined us, the Greenshirts had started to flank us. I didn’t want to know that Ymir had kept her distance because she was like a rat fleeing a sinking ship. I didn’t want to know that it was because of _him._

Our eyes met, and I knew.

“O-oh,” I stuttered out. I felt my legs go weak.

“Jean,” Marco began, sitting up with that apologetic expression that made me fall for him.

“Don’t,” I said, holding out a hand. “I don’t… I can’t… please don’t talk.” I turned away, put a hand to my mouth, started pacing. I did it to calm myself, but it didn’t do much good. My heart was racing, I could taste the salt of my sweat on my palm and everything felt like it wanted to fall apart and lay, twitching on the floor. _No, no, no, no, no._

“Jean, you don’t understand-” Marco tried.

“They’ve come for you, haven’t they?” I demanded, spinning on my heel to stare at him. My eyes were still wide, nostrils flaring like they always did when I was trying to hold back my temper. The hand on my mouth was trembling. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep it from betraying me further.

Marco opened his mouth, but no words came out. He shut it. Sighed. _No._ “They killed my sister, Jean. I know they did. I couldn’t stay.”

“W-why…” I swallowed painfully. Dropped my hand. Pressed my lips into the thinnest line I could muster. “Why have they come for you?”

Marco stared at me for a while. He didn’t want to tell me, I could tell by the way he looked at me so lost and frightened that it made my chest ache a little. He got to his feet slowly, like an old man, sighing as he did so, and only once he got to his full height did he start to speak. “Do you know about the Children, Jean?”

I bit my lip. Shook my head. “I know enough to know that they’re responsible for everything that’s gone wrong in this shitty world,” I said. “I don’t see what they have to do with this.”

Marco let out a wheezing noise like I’d slapped him. “The Children With Two Faces. That’s their full name. Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“They were normal children, Jean. They weren’t test subjects in an experiment gone wrong, they weren’t grown or altered or anything like that. They were just children. They were born, they had families who loved them, and they were _normal._ They were just as scared as everyone else was when they started… changing.” He shut his eyes. Wheezed again. “When they started turning into monsters, they were terrified. The roars of those monsters… they were screams, Jean. _Screams._ Can you imagine what it was like, to suddenly be trapped in a body that didn’t do anything you asked it to? To be so feral and unlike anything you were before?”

“It wasn’t a fucking party, I get it,” I sneered. I was losing my temper. “Marco, tell me what the fuck is going on right now, or I’m turning you over myself.” My stomach twisted at the thought. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it.

Marco, however, didn’t. His eyes widened, and before I knew it, he was gabbling again. “There are three of them, aren’t there? Two boys and a girl. They are the ones the government control, and use to make sure everyone does as they say. They keep them in those tanks, they keep them young by pumping them full of chemicals until they’re barely conscious, and they all just want to go home. B-but, because they didn’t _make_ them… no one really understands the possibilities of there being more than just those three.”

“How could there be more?” I hissed, my fists clenching by my sides. “How would they hide? Who would keep their secrets? How in the ever-living fuck could they-”

Then I saw the way he was looking at me.

And everything fell apart and came together all at once.

I stumbled away from him, almost treading on the dying fire in the process, and tried to speak. I tried to demand what the hell he was playing at. Nothing wanted to come out, even though I had so much to say. I just stood there, pressed against the opposite wall, moving my mouth with no sound coming out. I felt like I was drowning in every question that seemed to want to break the surface and shoot out my mouth, and being close to him was not helping. “Y-you’re…” I managed to get out.

Marco smiled, and it was such a sad smile I wanted to break. “I just wanted to go home, Jean. That’s all I wanted.”

I shook my head. “Why?” I croaked. I was asking why me- why I was the one he stumbled into, why I’d fucking fallen for a fucking Child on the run. I guess I never was good with luck.

He sighed. “My sister was one too. I figured it was a genetic thing, and I figured right. The authorities were aware of my sister, but not me. She made sure she kept me safe.” He turned his head to the window, and his look darkened. “Then they found her. They took her when she was out getting food for us. We used to move around a lot, and she used to steal those ration tokens from wherever we went. They arrested her for that- that was the reason they gave, anyway.”

I crossed the room to peer out the window again. I saw the distinct movement of an arm cocking a gun. Then I saw a few more do the same. My heart dropped. There were eight of them. I was ready to bet money on a back-up team standing by in case the Child decided to turn and ruin their day. I fell away and raked a hand through my hair, shaking from head to toe. “S-so you ran,” I said. I couldn’t believe how together my voice was. I was already accepting him as a Child and the only thing I was scared of was the group of Greenshirts outside. My breath wheezed feebly in my chest. “You fought, and then you ran.”

Marco sighed. “I wasn’t going to let them take me, Jean.”

“R-right.” I felt faint. “Well, now they’re outside, and we better fucking do something about it.”

Marco bit his lip and followed me to the window. His brow furrowed as he counted, worked something out in his head. As he thought, he reached out a hand to me in a silent request for acceptance. I should have slapped his hand away, told him that there was no way in hell I was going to trust him after all that had happened, but that’s not what happened. I slipped my hand into his, and squeezed hard. That’s what this life does to you: it makes you desperate. Once you find something you want to keep close, you cling on tight and hope it doesn’t get away. I wasn’t going to let him get away, Child or not, and I think that steadied him. Life was too rushed to worry about formalities like that- I’d have time to yell at him and hit him and abandon him for a few days to get my head together later. Or so I hoped.

Eventually, Marco spoke. “I can take them,” he concluded.

I gawped at him. “Are you fucking serious?”

“If we don’t fight,” Marco said, frowning slightly as he turned to me, “then what? We run?”

“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”

Marco’s glare returned. “But we _have_ to fight, don’t you see? What would be the point if we ran?”

“We’d survive. We’d have a better chance, anyway.” The fact that I had to bring it down to chance didn’t do my nerves any favours.

“The Interior are Blackhearting everyone who does not follow their rule,” Marco said, “and if we don’t fight these Greenshirts, who’s to say they’ll ever stop chasing us?”

I shook my head. No. I was selfish. I couldn’t afford to care. “No one _says_ , but it’s worth trying. I won’t fight them, Marco. I’m running. Away. Far away.” I drew my hand from his, still shaking my head. “If you want to go out there in a blaze of glory, then go ahead- I w-won’t follow you.”

Marco reached out for me, even as I drew away and started to pace again. Even then, when I’d pissed him off to high heaven and he probably wanted to just leave me to my own devices, he couldn’t. Something was keeping him there. He took in a shuddering breath. “Where would we go?” he whispered, his breath cold in the air.

I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t tell him that we would just run as fast as we could away from them all, run into the trees and stay there, hiding until they left. No. I couldn’t do that. I definitely couldn’t tell him that the range of the Greenshirts’ guns would be enough to be able to pick us off if they were good shots. I just lifted my head high, met his gaze, and held it steady. I even tried a small smile, even if it wasn’t the most authentic thing in the world. “We’re going to Olympus,” I replied.

Marco’s hand dropped. “Olympus?” he asked. “That’s nothing but a children’s story,” he muttered. “It’s an old story, one of those stories the ancient people used to tell.” But I saw the hope there. It was small, fluttering like a butterfly behind his eyes, but it was there wishing that what I was saying was true. It was enough.

I gave him a weak grin. “How do you know that? You’ve never been there.”

He rolled his eyes. “No one has,” he said, as though he were talking to a child, “because it _does not exist._ ”

“Well, it’s a good thing I have more faith in my own feet than you do.” I offered him my hand again, wiggling the fingers invitingly. Marco stared down at it for a while, unsure. And then a warning shot cracked through the air, ricocheting off the wall opposite us and narrowly missing his ear when it shot back to bury itself in the floor. Marco didn’t even flinch, but any last remainder of colour he had in his cheeks drained from his body. “Come on,” I prompted, wrapping my fingers around his wrist. “Let’s go to Olympus, Marco. You and me.”

He wetted his lips, glanced down at our hands, smiled. Then he reached over to brush his lips against my cheek, a motion that made his lost colour mutiny over to me. And then he murmured those three fatal words in my ear, and I might as well have died there and then.

We left the house at the back. The minute we were outside, we began to run.

I didn’t look back.

 

Didn’t hear the shouts of the Greenshirts when they realised they should have had us surrounded.

 

I tried to forget about the gunshots that came afterwards.

 

I just thought about him, the Child with my hand in his and our hearts bursting out of our chests with the effort.

 

I just thought about the rain.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to leave it open-ended... it's my evil side coming out now, SfS awoke a dragon mwahaha.
> 
> God save us, every one.


End file.
